Wednesday, August 09, 2017

My rant blaming America first, or : Bring em on, 2

I haven't gone on a
blame America first rant in a while. Being a lefty, this makes me sad.

So here's one.

Let's go
on one about NKorea's nukes. Gotta goback to 1976, when Pakistan and
North Korea agreed to be good buddies. At that time, this meant general
pats on the back at the U.N. But things were going to be cooking in Pakistan.

That was because a
certain Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, had an idea. The idea was to steal a
buncha blueprints from a European nuclear power consortium. Which he did.
However, the Dutch caught him, and put him on trial in 1985. They fumbled the
first case, and were about to mount another, when the CIA leaned on the Dutch.
The message was, don’t get Pakistan angry. (I get this material from Adrian
Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark’s excellent account, Deception: Pakistan, the
United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons)

You may remember – or
perhaps you weren’t born yet and don’t remember – that Pakistan was our
frontline ally in trying to free Afghanistan from the horrible Soviet yoke and
restore it to Islamicist freedom fighters. The Reagan administration was on all
cylinders to get this to happen.

Unfortunately, U.S.
intelligence kept coming up with info that the Pakistanis were building a
nuclear bomb. They even got Reagan to ask General Zia, then Pakistan’s
dictator, if this was true. In Reagan’s diary, he recorded that Zia denied it.
Well, old mister ‘Trust but Verify” didn’t really feel that verifying was
called for her. Zia was a patriot and a fine soldier!

Others in his
administration, including George Schulz, the Sec. of State, did write memos
saying maybe we should apply some little bitty pressure on Pakistan. But
instead, Pakistan was flooded with military aid. And secret aid from the CIA.

This was fortunate.
Building nuclear bombs is an expensive business. The Pakistan government was
broke. Where was doctor Khan going to get funding for his little project?

Well, nobody knows.
There has been some revelation that of the 500 million it cost to build the
centrifuges and get the nuclear biz going, some 18 million came from the
Pakistan government. But wait! Wasn’t there some secret funds from the
Americans sloshing around?

You remember the
Saudis, don’t you? Keeping unfree so that the free world can be free! Big
applause for them, and maybe a little pity party for Saudi women. God bless em,
they, at least, can gaze at the U.S. and see how feminist we are here! We are
practically role models.

But to get back to
North Korea. North Korea can mine uranium itself, since Satan put some uranium
in the ground in that country. But where were they to get the centrifuges to
spin out that good stuff? This is where Pakistan, under Clinton and Bush’s
watchful gaze, came in handy. After nuke tests in 1999 announced to the world
that Pakistan was ready to party, time to start selling the shit and making a
profit. Actually, even before, in 1996, Clinton’s peeps noticed that Pakistani
equipment was ending up in N. Korea. Like all tough American presidents,
Clinton’s peeps really gave the Pakistanis an earful! And then bushels of
money. This was followed by Bush, who also gave the Pakistanis an earful, and
then bushels of money.

In this way, we were
cleverly troping Pavlov, awarding negative behavior with positive strokes. It
was all an experiment in behavior, don’t you know.

Well, upshot was that
North Korea has enough smarties, and enough Pakistani provided equipment, that
they know what to do. And so today, Dear Leader 1 vs. Dear Leader 2 makes us
all think, hmm, is it time for the U.S. to suffer a million casualties – BUT AT
LEAST SHOW THE WORLD WHOSE BOSS!

That’s how they do
the thinking on the level above all our grades. Cause they’s so smart!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.